Overview

    iGEM is more than a place to compete for prizes. It is a chance to collaborate and communicate with people from different backgrounds but with the same enthusiasm for synthetic biology.

AFOB Regional Symposium (ARS)

        We invited 13 iGEM teams from all over places to the ARS conference for idea and research exchange. It includes a presentation section for teams to reveal their projects for iGEM this year and a Q&A section to offer feedback to improve our ideas (see Education & Communication page).

NCHU_Taichung

    NCHU_Taichung was the first team we collaborated with. We held a virtual meeting to share the initial ideas for our projects and the obstacles that we had faced. While both of our teams decided to apply radiation in our projects, feedback and advice from that meeting helped us to clarify what radiation source we should apply in our project and improve our experiment design. In addition, we ran a Youtube channel with all iGEM teams in Taiwan and released a series of audiobooks to share knowledge regarding synthetic biology with a broader audience (see Education & Communication page).

KU_Leuven

    We contacted each other via Instagram and decided to hold a podcast together. iGEM competition cares about not only synthetic biology but also a variety of other professional fields; therefore, we invited Dr. Yi Yang, who specializes in physics and helped us a lot in our hardware design, to be the guest on our podcast where he shared with us how he overcame obstacles in his studies. By including the opinions and experiences of someone with a different perspective, we hope that we can make the iGEM community more diverse than ever (see Education & Communication page).

CCU_Taiwan

    CCU_Taiwan 2022 is a team dedicated to preventing cardiovascular disease (CVD) from various aspects. After an online discussion, we were impressed by CCU_Taiwan’s interesting human practices in education and communication. We participated in one of their CVD-free activities, aiming to teach the general public how they can reduce the risk of getting CVD. By collecting recipes of CVD-free dishes from all over the world, everyone can easily understand what they should eat and what they should avoid in meals. Besides, we chose a traditional Taiwanese dish and provided the description and several online recipes of it, so people can taste this healthy dish easily regardless of which country they are in.

Tec-Chihuahua

    Only through communication and education can we let the public see the beauty of synthetic biology. To make our projects accessible to all ages, we collaborated with team Tec-Chihuahua on a short comic book to share our projects more easily. The comic book was designed colorless for kids studying in elementary or middle schools to color it and enjoy the contents at the same time. Moreover, we avoided advanced knowledge of synthetic biology and focused more on the personification of Se coli so that even young students without any background knowledge can understand. By doing so, we hope to bring synthetic biology and iGEM into the daily lives of more people in a meaningful way (see Education & Communication page).

Mingdao

    Mingdao is a Taiwanese high school that has been participating in iGEM competitions for many years. We mutually shared our projects with each other and exchanged feedback during an online meeting. To encourage more people to join iGEM, this online meeting also invited hundreds of students who are interested in biology from Mindao’s junior high department. We elaborated on what iGEMers do to those students after sharing our project with Mingdao iGEM team. We hope that after knowing more about iGEM, these junior high school students can be inspired to become future iGEMers.

USAFA

    To make our idea accessible to a wider audience, we have collaborated with USAFA on a coloring book that can be given to young students all around the world. We provided our solution to the problems we are solving within synthetic biology, while USAFA helped us turn them into beautiful coloring books and interesting stories. We believe this activity can impact the little ones by generating an approach to the applications of Synbio and igniting their passion in science.